AuthorTopic: Old Hallway candle lighting ideas? (Read 5139 times)

Hi all, I'm putting together a scene that takes place in an old medieval type hallway. I've made the hallway, candles and morphs for the flames to move and flicker,(hopefully). I have four candles and have set a spotlight over each one with inner 25 and outer 35 degrees radius which seems sort of okay but I'd like the candles to shed their light on the walls.(like real candles). Any ideas or suggestions?I thought of using some kind of glow filters for this but mine are spheres and to blatantly visible! I'd also like to try and get the shadows from them to move which I thought may work if I move the lights randomly ever so slightly above them. I have a character that I'm working on and would like the light from the (candles) to cast his shadows.

Gee, I'd really appreciate any input on making this scene look a bit spooky!?

Hi there. Thanks so much for your advice and input. I don't quite understand the scaling function on lights. I know you can make them larger or smaller but I see the beam lines stay identical. I thought it was merely to make editing easier without bulky lights in the way? Does it also decrease or increase their intensity? I'll give the 50/60 angle a go. At the moment I also have 3 glow filters around each flame with ambience set at 8.0 for each, transparency at 0.01 which I move as the flame moves with a local shining right into it. It gives a reasonably realistic glow but no light is actually seen on the walls. Is there a better way? I thought of placing a flat, smooth, transparent reflective patch behind each on the wall? Sorry about the letter but I'd really like to try and get it looking good.Thanks again!Ian

The scaling that kreator mentioned in in the Advanced Light propertied. Set the Inner Radius to 50 and the Outer Radius to 75. Make sure it's a Local light in the main Light dialog. The Angle parameter isn't used for local Lights.

Local lights emit light in all directions, as opposed to spot lights that can only emit into a hemisphere at maximum. Lights of this type should illuminate the walls, if no illumination is apparent it may be due to the normals being incorrectly aligned on the walls (if so, flip them) or something to do with the walls' material.

Regarding the radius settings, effectively the light will illuminate anything within the Inner Radius 100%, and anything outside the Outer Radius 0%. So something that falls half way between the inner and outer radii will be illuminated 50%. Depending on the scale of your model you may need to adjust these settings to get the result you're looking for.

Glow spheres are a bit trickier, especially if you are rendering with ART which always casts 100% shadows*. A sphere around the flame will effectively block any light inside it from illuminating anything using ART, if you are using Scanline you can set the spheres to not cast shadows. An alternate method would be to place circular objects between the flames and camera that simulate the glow from each candle, so long as the camera is static it should look ok. If the camera moves you will need to move the circles too.

* May have been resolved in an update, I'm a bit out of touch with recent developments.

Thanks so much Kreator, I understand. I notice that local angles can't be changed. I've tried as recommended but still no visible light.Thanks for your timeIan

Thank you for the detailed help ENSONIQ5.I tried fixing and flipping normals. I still have no light visible. However, 4 small illuminated circles appear in the lights locations in the ceiling now when rendering. I am using Art Ray Trace as Scanline is extremely slow, about 5 minutes to render 1 image of 400 x 300 when I tested compared to about 4 seconds for the same using Art, unless I'm doing something wrong?

As far as the textures go, I built the hallway in units using seamless rock and floor tile jpegs and rotated them to face the correct way using UV function. I used the same images in higher contrast for Bumpmaps on both, set at 100%. Other than that, I used the standard materials settings except for the roughness which I have at 3.0 as I don't want the material to appear too smooth and shine.

I so appreciate your advice, any idea what the problem could be?Best regards,Ian

Anim8or does not Project Light in the physical sense, You have to fake it with an Emssive texture. Ie if you had two Spot Lights in the headlights of a car It would not project the light, You would need to add a couple of Cones To fake the light.

I did an article about lightcones in an issue of Dotan8 The last one in 2010 you should be able to get it via my dropbox

Best guess is something weird with the material, ie. not enough difference between Ambient and Diffuse, too low Specular or global Ambient level too high. Maybe upload the an8 file so we can take a look.

Thank you so much to all of you for so freely sharing your advice and knowledge. The support is valued!

ENSONIQ was right about the 'normals'. I detached the floor and roof, flipped normals and reattached/ joined solid. Turns out my specular value of 0.6 for both needed to be tweaked to 1.2. I now have light!! Just need to fiddle with local inner and outer amount s. 250 and 400 comes close but will tweak it later when I have some time. Still want to try filters in front of the camera for the candle flames.

Only 71 Frames I did have cobwebs all over the place but cannot find the png files now.... and I am sure I redid this with real fire at some point cause I didnt like the candles still I hope it conveys the spooky feel !!